Presentation: Semiotics and Economics, the General Framework

The connections between semiotics and economics have been discussed for centuries in various philosophical contexts, but early writings on the topic remained mostly restricted to the relationships between goods exchanged for money and meanings communicated by means of words or messages. Leibniz was an early semiotician of economics with his reflections on the affinities and differences between the material values inherent in gold, coins, and coinlike tokens as compared to the semantic values of verbal signs (Dascal 1978). Foucault’s Order of Things (1966) is a grand theory of representation aiming, among other things, at revealing affinities between economic and semiotic order in the cultural history from the Renaissance to modernity. Bauer (1998) and Kliemt (2003) give a general outline of such interrelations between political economy and semiotics since Thomas Hobbes. In 20th century semiotics, the affinity between semiotics and economics has first been brought into view by Roman Jakobson. With reference to Claude Levi-Strauss, who had anticipated the idea in some respects, Jakobson declared that both research fields are concerned with the study of communication, although at different levels. While semiotics studies the exchange of messages, economics studies the “exchange of utilities (namely goods and services)” so that both “approach the same kind of problems on different strategic levels and really pertain to the same field” (Jakobson 1971 : 663). A perspective on economics that has often been interpreted as semiotic avant la lettre can be found in part 1, chapter 1, section 1 to 3 of Karl Marx’s Capital (Erckenbrecht 1973 : 98-119; Goldschmidt 1990; Scheffczyk 1998 : 1456). In this chapter, Marx distinguishes between the use and the exchange values of a commodity, interprets the latter as a “social hieroglyphic” whose meaning needs to be deciphered, and concludes that “to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language”. As an object of exchange, a commodity “comes into communication with another commodity […and] betrays its thoughts […] in the language of commodities in order to tell us that its own value is created by labor” (sect. 3.2). However, says Marx, the language of commodities always speaks of the exchange value of its hieroglyphics, never of their use value. Of mainly historical and terminological interest is that Saussure’s contemporary Maffeo Pantaleoni (1857-1924), an influential Italian economist of his time, postulated a “semiologia” or “semiotica economica” in the 1890s and in the first decade of the 20th century. By this term, he designated a science aiming at “bringing together economic facts susceptible to statistical expression” (Mortara 1925 : 215). In the first paragraph of his paper, “Observations sur la sémiologie économique I : Système d’indice unique et système totaliseur”, Pantaleoni wrote : Pantaleoni thus conceived of “Statistical Semiotics” as a science whose task it is to interpret the “symptoms” of the facts and the tendencies hidden below statistical data collected by economists. Historically remarkable is the introduction of the terms semiology and semiotics into a sociological context nine years before Naville introduced the term semiology in his Nouvelle classification des sciences of 1901 (cf. Nöth 2021). In the first half of the 20th century, apparently without any influence from Marx and without any reference to Saussure, Karl Bühler, in chapter 4.3 of his Theory of Language, proposed a semiotic (“sematological”, as he called it,) interpretation of the system of commodities to demonstrate that “the counterpart to significative contact is the exchange of goods”. Goods, in the system of economy, are like the words of the system of language, he argues, when they become general types (legisigns, in Peirce’s terminology) …